A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged. Colleagues have revealed the renowned theoretical physicist’s final academic work was to set out the groundbreaking mathematics needed for a spacecraft to find traces of multiple big bangs. Currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal, the paper, named A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation, may turn out to be Hawking’s most important scientific legacy. The new paper is a bid to clear up an issue thrown up by Hawking’s 1983 “no-boundaries” theory Credit: Barcroft Images Fellow researchers have said that if the evidence which the new theory promises had been discovered before Hawking died last week, it may have secured the Nobel Prize which had eluded him for so long. The new paper seeks to resolve an issue thrown up by Hawking’s 1983 “no-boundary” theory which described how the universe burst into existence with the big bang. According to that account, the universe instantaneously expanded from a tiny point into a prototype of what we live in today, a process known as inflation. But the theory also predicted an infinite number of big bangs, each creating their own universe, a “multiverse”, which presented a mathematical paradox because it is seemingly impossible to measure. Read more | Professor Stephen Hawking Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University, told The Sunday Times: The intriguing idea in Hawking’s paper is that [the multiverse] left its imprint on the background radiation permeating our universe and we could measure it with a detector on a spaceship. “These ideas offer the breathtaking prospect of finding evidence for the existence of other universe.” Professor Thomas Hertog, from KU Leuven University in Belgium, worked with Hawking on the new theory and said he met …read more

Several people were killed and cars crushed when a newly installed pedestrian bridge spanning several lanes of traffic collapsed at Florida International University in Miami-Dade County, officials said. There were at least five to six vehicles crushed underneath the pedestrian crosswalk. The bridge connects the university with the city of Sweetwater and was installed on Saturday in six hours over the eight-lane highway, according to a story that was posted on the university’s website.

Holmes and Theranos made a deal to settle the case against them, with the penalty including her surrendering majority voting control of the company, according to a statement by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Founded in 2003 by Holmes when she was only 19, the company had been seen as a rising star but came under scrutiny after The Wall Street Journal published articles questioning the reliability of its technology. Theranos, which had touted a new way of testing that uses far less blood and delivers faster results at much lower cost than traditional methods in US labs, had been under civil and criminal investigation over its claims.